Traits of an Empath

[Phobia/Pierce Fobster]

OOC: Day 27, semi-private thread.

Phobia has bad days. He has bad days and days that are not as bad and things haven’t really gotten much improvement over the last few million years. Sometimes though, after finding an empty place where the threat of contact with people diminished silently into the static wall of emotion in his mind, he would have a stable day.

This wasn’t that, but it was close and he was reluctant to let it diminish just yet. He was a loyal little Decepticon, yes? Being a little late due to a moment of sanity had to be okay. Anyways, he still had half an hour to worry about whether or not the false sense of calm was worth risking punishment for. And he was hiding neatly in a cleaning supply closet, boxes standing between him and the field of view of anyone entering the room. Very much out of the way and harmless.

Occasionally, the sound of footsteps would go by, along with the accompanying faint hazes of emotions, but they were brief and scattered between long stretches of black and heavy silences. After a particularly long bout of soundless darkness however, he distantly registers the footsteps of... someone not terribly large. Hm.

It didn’t entirely bother him until he heard the steps coming closer and the distant fuzz of someone unfamiliar and... very, very strange. The moment of serenity dissipated with a puff and rising sense of dread.

[Rampage/Xavier Goodkind]

Rampage roams through Ship's corridors, a data pad with a map of the vessel held loosely in one hand. Having been processed, but still confined to the ship, he's giving himself something of a self-directed tour and musing over the places he might stash the remains of Tarantulas's body if he ever gets the chance to off him without the spider giving up his secret.

He almost walks past the door of Phobia's hiding place, but comes to a quick stop as a rising hint of dread tickles across his spark. His head turns towards the door, and his spark-sense focuses. There's someone in there. Someone... interesting. A sparkless individual, and yet there was something almost familiar about the feel of this mind, something strange that he couldn't quite put a claw on.

Glancing down at the data pad, he consults the map. A closet, hm? Someone hiding in fear, perhaps? Oh, he dearly hopes so. He just can't resist the siren call of dread and the possibility to deepen it. Especially not in a curiously odd mind.

Opening the door, he stands in the door frame of the dark closet and calls out, "Knock, knock."

[Phobia/Pierce Fobster]

It was sort of ironic that Rampage came the one time when Phobia hadn’t been hiding in fear.

A sharp brightness floods the dark room and Phobia freezes on the spot, even as he watches a bizarre silhouette slide into the pool of light. He makes out a head and two legs, but the rest are jumbled up together, cutting out shadows in the shape of two massive, skeletal hands.

The room felt wrong now. The newcomer’s presence filled up the space and made Phobia feel trapped and small, as if the entire closet had been filled up with mercury and the bike clamps down on his senses before any wild currents of panic can spark up. There was something else, under the readily familiar and superfluous fuzz of ‘presence’- something a bit more worrying.

He nearly jumps out of his shell when the person speaks.

Slowly, the black bike sits up and peers over the boxes he’d been hiding behind, his visor a floating blob of red in the dark. It was a.... Predacon? Ah, that explained why the footsteps had been so light. Phobia probably could’ve stood up and been a good meter or so taller, although that did surprisingly little to curb the persisting rise of anxiety.

“... Who’s there?” He asks after a moment, his voice gentle and warm as ever. The joke didn’t improve things much, but as long as he could make the stranger kept his distance, he could probably manage the fear.

[Rampage/Xavier Goodkind]

"Rampage," he says, culling the incipient knock-knock joke before it can be born. Though his name could probably be part of a punchline itself. "And you are?"

He leans casually against the door frame as he considers Phobia, his crab-legs splayed wide. He still doesn't exactly fill the door, but it would be awkward to make it past without touching him. The closet-dweller looks to be a Decepticon, a sparkless one like Hellbender, though not quite so large.

The bike's restrained fear is tasty, and while Rampage wonders where its coming from, he's mostly interested in creating more of it. More than that, however, the deeper he senses, the stranger this Decepticon feels. There's Phobia's presence, clear enough, but he can almost feel the presence of another in the area, the ghost of a spark. And yet if he turns his attention from Phobia and tries to search for that presence, the trace fades away.

His optics narrow. And that trace itself is strangely familiar. What is it?

[Phobia/Pierce Fobster]

“Rampage,” he echoes with a small, friendly smile while standing up and stepping out from behind the boxes. “You must be new. Or at the very least, I haven't seen you around before.” The Predacon seemed a bit small for a name like that, but maybe the little fellow was like Brawn or something. His mere presence was certainly more than enough for Phobia himself.

“I am Phobia,” the black bike bows graciously, dainty hand resting lightly on his chest. "A pleasure to meet you." He straightens then and takes in the way the crab had strategically taken up the doorway. There was still the air vent behind him to take into consideration, but he was pretty sure the crab could chase him in there. If he could get past Rampage this way, he had the advantage of being a speedy, agile bike in a big hallway.

The problem was getting by without being touched.

[Rampage/Xavier Goodkind]

"Phobia?" he says, cocking a brow. Well, there's a name that hints at the potential for hours of fun. "I assure you, the pleasure is all mine." His tone is actually quite friendly, almost warm, but perhaps with a small hint of unsavory intentions.

"Yes, I'm quite new," he continues, making innocent smalltalk. Phobia doesn't seem to appreciate him being here and the bike's discomfort amuses him. As he speaks, he probes deeper, feeling for the ghostly presence that seems to be nearby, but he can only seem to sense through Phobia. A presence that he is certain he has never felt before, and yet at the same time is infuriatingly familiar. He dances on the edge of understanding, and concentrates harder. "Just arrived the other day. Lovely ship you ha-"

He breaks off suddenly as the startling realization hits him, surely impossible and yet so fitting. Shoving himself away from the wall he stalks quickly towards Phobia, part of him lamenting his inability to loom over the Decepticon.

"You!" he marvels out loud. "It's an echo of myself, through you."

Caution thrown to the wind in the face of a miraculous discovery. He'll think of an excuse for his abilities later, if need be.

[Phobia/Pierce Fobster]

The false gentleness drains from Phobia’s face and he recoils involuntarily as Rampage strides closer, lips pressed into a thin, frightened line. “I- what?”

Through him.

His back hits one of the supply shelves and the bike jumps, sending a few bottles of cleaning agents to the floor. “No, that’s not-” he lets out a bark of nervous laughter still trying to back away from Rampage in the confined space. Then ends up wedging himself into a corner and sending a few more boxes of chemicals and tools to the floor in the process.

“Please don’t,” Phobia warns quietly, quickly edging his way towards the exit and taking very extreme care not to touch Rampage in any way possible. If the Predacon really is what Phobia thinks he is, he really didn’t want to find out what’d happen if they touched

[Rampage/Xavier Goodkind]

OOC: Terribly sorry about the wait!

His crab legs fanned wide, Rampage shifts to block Phobia's escape route. "You're like me, aren't you?" he says, sounding both pleased and incredulous. "You can feel me, can't you? Down into my spark, and then I can feel myself through you. But how can you?"

So strange, that one without a spark could sense him so, but really no stranger than the fact that his spark could sense those without. A barely-realized prejudice that sparks were superior to other forms of Transformer mind that he might already have to set aside.

"Ah, friend, your fear is delightful," he says with a cackle and reaches out to grab Phobia. This is far, far too interesting a development for him to just let the Decepticon go.

[Phobia/Pierce Fobster]

“Oh, dear, your finger things!” Phobia squeaks and back pedals unhappily when he finds his way blocked by crab legs. Up, he could still climb up the shelves and hop over the legs but he sees Rampage reaching out to grab him and utters a terrified gasp, throwing his arms out in a futile attempt to stop the hand.

“Don’t touch me--”

Come to think of it, having his mind inverted hadn’t exactly been at the top of his to-do list today.

The actual sensation of contact was lost to Phobia. While he wasn’t a particularly powerful empath with the shield of distance between him and other people, actual contact rendered that small relief from the curse entirely null.

The experience of feeling someone else’s emotions was familiar enough. It was always a struggle to keep himself intact when it was so hard to differentiate between himself and someone else, but he could generally do it. He had never, however, actually felt himself reflected back from someone else’s mind.

There was Rampage’s presence and it felt... horrifyingly young. A small and dark cruel ball of sadism and curiosity colored with echoes of pain and rage, but they were simple threads, not yet wound together into infinitely complicated tangles by age. Between the strands he could taste finer wires of more complicated background emotions- nervousness, confusion, a shade of something smaller and quieter- but he didn’t dare try to untangle them.

In the middle of the maelstrom he could see himself reflected back, a jigsaw puzzle of terror and confusion, he could feel the Predacon seeing his own echoes- and the reflection of himself seeing that within another echo and on and on until it was hard to tell where it all ended or began.

---

OOC: Posing of Rampage done with player permission.

[Rampage/Xavier Goodkind]

Rampage can usually keep his own emotions and those of the people around him separate. The feelings of others are more like touches on his spark, or tastes. Sensations easily recognizable as outside himself. But this is different. He can feel Phobia, and he can feel Phobia feeling him, and he can feel Phobia feeling him feeling Phobia, on and on, strung together in an infinite loop until he isn't sure where he ends and the Decepticon begins. A spiral into madness.

And worse, he realizes that they're feeling deep into himself, deeper than he tends to feel others. Past the surface that he sometimes shows the world, past the conscious emotions that he keeps to himself, down into the places he tries to ignore, down into places he isn't sure he realized he had-

With a shout, he manages to fight through the swirl of shared perception and shoves himself away from Phobia. Without even thinking, he snaps his cannon from subspace and points it at Phobia's face. The barrel of the gun jitters unsteadily and he realizes that his entire body is trembling slightly. That was an... interesting experience.

His optics narrow. In retrospect, he might have expected that interacting with another empath would result in sharing things that he would prefer to keep to himself.

[Phobia/Pierce Fobster]

The lights snap out and Phobia is left alone in the dark with someone else’s demons, desperately trying to struggle free from the trap. Just keeping himself separate from Rampage had sapped a lot of his willpower, but now he had to fight with the remnants of the sudden contact; the weakening of his mental walls and the thousands of other screaming voices clawing their way into the other side- into what was left of his mind.

For a few seconds, the person that stares back at Rampage isn’t Phobia. It was the echo from before, but more whole, more solid and it was serenely smiling up at him with an eyeless face and unfamiliar lips.

Then the mirror slowly disappears, merging into the many, many shadows behind the red visor and Phobia finds himself staring down the barrel of a cannon, too exhausted to do little more than whimper.

[Rampage/Xavier Goodkind]

Rampage remains silent for long moments as he composes himself, withdrawing his empathic senses as much as he ever can. He wishes he could cut himself off completely, but he can still feel Phobia's mind and what he feels is... chaotic. And for a few seconds, what he feels is himself.

He's not sure what to do with this situation. It's hard to think right now. The easy thing would be to pull the trigger, send charred fragments of Phobia's strange little mind spraying across the closet wall. But that wouldn't be the intelligent thing to do, and while he may be a monster, he prides himself on being an intelligent monster. He doesn't know nearly enough about this place to get away with murder. Yet.

But... more than that, he's not sure he wants to kill Phobia. This experience has been deeply unsettling, but also terribly, terribly interesting. He needs time to dwell on this.

He's stopped trembling and he lowers his gun and begins to chuckle. "My friend, we are alike, and yet so very, very different." He slings the cannon casually over his shoulder. "A word to the wise, whatever you saw in me is mine and mine alone. Keep it to yourself. Otherwise..." He strokes his chin, looking almost innocently thoughtful. "I've never had Decepticon before. Looks tasty."

Then he slowly turns to leave.


OOC: Lemme know if there's something in this that doesn't work for you!

[Phobia/Pierce Fobster]

The moment the gun was lifted away, Phobia feels his vents stutter to life with a sickly whirr and he slumps further against the wall, fervently squashing any quiet little voices of disappointment. The bike would need a bit more time to properly pull himself together. Maybe pick a few scattered bits up off the ground. He can still feel the new presence lurking dangerously close to the surface, the edges sharp and clear as day.

He watches Rampage as the Predacon turns to go, too exhausted to be scared for the time being- or anything else for that matter. The crab’s words register distantly and it takes a moment for them to be properly unscrambled through the dark haze, but the black mech curls up unhappily when he does.

“It’s mine now too,” Phobia says quietly, managing to dredge up something like resentment. “Consider it extra spicing.” He couldn’t exactly return what he has and Rampage couldn’t exactly take it back. He had tried to warn him, hadn’t he?

[Rampage/Xavier Goodkind]

Rampage pauses by the doorway but doesn't turn around. He lets out a bark of mad laughter. "Crab-flavoured Decepticon, hm? Sounds delightful."

Taking a few steps forward, he glances back and repeats firmly. "Keep it to yourself." Then he exits the small room and even has the courtesy to close the door behind him, leaving Phobia to pull himself together in privacy.

He has much to think about.


And that's about done, yes?

[Phobia/Pierce Fobster]

The darkness refills the room but Phobia keeps his sight on the closed door, only letting his head fall back against a shelf Rampage’s presence fades away with his footsteps. This... had not been how his day was supposed to go.

He wasn’t sure exactly what to do now except maybe sit there and try to find find any metaphorically scattered bits of his processor. The desire to pick through the implications of Rampage’s words- and the fact at he was somehow still alive- were something he’d have to sort through later, when it wasn’t making the new little shadow of a monster inside him prickle gleefully.

---

OOC: Wrap!